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Thursday, March 4, 2010

The next version of Captain Forever has been released, and I beat it yesterday. Sadly, the screenshot I took only shows the score; I hit the shift key to do a screen grab and disengaged all my fancy kilo-modules.

Here's one from another session with the increasingly perplexed Captian Blix on my tail:And for the win:What a beautiful game. I wish I could examine the source code for it...

Farbs certainly defied my expectations in a most pleasing way. I had been expecting a more incremental-sort-of update, maybe with multiplayer, the addition of ships you could keep between sessions, maybe the possibility of a "home base." What he did was totally change the focus of the game. Before it was mostly about building a solid ship; piloting skills became secondary once you figured out how the game AI worked and how to exploit it.

This new game forces you to focus on piloting. Since you can only copy other ships, you have to learn to fly what would otherwise be suboptimal designs. It also goes much faster since you're not spending lots of time dragging modules around, and new enemies are thrown at you constantly.

In other news, I finally took a dive on the turn I like to take really fast on my bicycle. There was no chance of recovery; as soon as I realized something was wrong I was sprawled on the pavement. My left handlebar got stuck under the cross-beam; I imagine that I turned too sharply and the wheel caught and turned sideways. No real injury except for a couple raspberries and a twinge in my spine.